The deal I made with David Lynch

(And why I've kept it for fifteen years)

I’m not the only person who moved to Los Angeles because they were in thrall to David Lynch. Okay, there was a pragmatism to my shift from east to west: the agent who’d signed me as a screenwriter said it would be easier for him to get me work if I moved there. I just might not have braved it if ‘Mulholland Drive’ had not recently come out. By the time I boarded the plane with my cats, I’d seen it twice on the big screen.

So, I knew I would be required to attend “generals” (essentially a screenwriter’s “Go Sees” where an executive tells you your writing is genius of a level not seen since ‘The Fisher King’ and then asks if you want to write a romcom for Kate Hudson). But, because of ‘Mulholland Drive’, I also suspected there were would be portals, in this city built on shifting tectonic plates. The portal I’d one day walk through that led me straight to David Lynch himself came later.

In that first year, I was walking the hard shoulder of Laurel Canyon boulevard because I couldn’t drive, encountering unhoused people who had been ejected so entirely from society that they had become Lynch’s “creature behind the wall at Winkies parking lot”. The overt otherness of what becomes of humans who fall through the cracks in L.A was like the second half of ‘Mulholland Drive’ where everything has been taken from her.